


Cicatrize

by kitashvi



Series: Atonement [2]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: And yet, Angst, Gen, Malik is hikari, Marik is yami, Minor Violence, Post-Canon, Sequel to RECOMPENSE, Smartassery, Swearing, yami marik is no good with children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-20
Updated: 2014-01-20
Packaged: 2018-01-09 09:13:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1144200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitashvi/pseuds/kitashvi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marik nods and Chiyo settles down on the dusty floor in front of him, so he tells her a story about pharaohs with golden talismans and battles on flying ships and boys who loved their brothers so much they chased them into the afterworld. And about the boys who went after them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cicatrize

**Author's Note:**

> **This was a beast. A giant, difficult beast. I'd entertained the idea of doing only the first section as a little follow-up, but the plot just sank its claws into me and wouldn't let up. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with it.**
> 
> **I wasn't sure if Ryou's dad was just an Egyptologist associated with the Domino Museum or what, so I gave him a promotion and made him curator. Also, I know Middle Egyptian was spoken mainly between 2000-1350 BCE, but I am only familiar with Middle, not Late (yeah, I speak Middle Egyptian, shut up) and since the manga wrapped up in 2004, in this fic the events of the manga that happened in Ancient Egypt would've been ~3400 years ago instead of 3000.**
> 
> **Fun fact: I modeled Chiyo and Marik's relationship after a character relationship in a Miyazaki film.**

Marik opens the door and swears that if it’s Yugi, he’ll gut the little twerp like he should have at the morgue. Instead, a child stares back at him, eyes flitting from his jewelry to the knife in his hand. “H-Hi. I’m, um, I was wondering if—I mean, maybe you know him—” she stops, takes a deep breath, starts over. “Does Ryou live here? I wanted to talk to him.”  
  
Marik stares at her long enough that she starts to fidget. Finally, he says, “I’m the only one left.”  
  
“O-Oh.” The girl wrings her hands together. “His brother saved my life.” She peers around him into the dark house. “Did he move?”  
  
“You’ve just missed him,” Marik hears himself say, and the words taste bitter. “He and my brother just left.”  
  
“When will they be back?”  
  
His throat is too tight, and it hurts to breathe. “They won’t.”  
  
She stares down at her shoes, clicking her heels together. “Oh. Do you know where they went? I just really wanted to talk to him because I only saw him once and he left really quickly and my mom thought it was a good idea for me to stop by, but I wasn’t sure if he would be at school or something so I came after school—”  
  
It’s rude, he knows, but Marik shuts the door in her face. He slides to the floor, spine digging into the wood and drops his head into his hands. He can still feel her outside. “Go home, child. There’s nothing for you here.”  
  
Footsteps move away from the door and then trip over themselves coming back. He hears the thud of her backpack and then her knees as she kneels down and presses her tiny palm to the door. “Are you okay?”  
  
Marik turns to stare at the door. He can’t have heard her right.  
  
“If you’re not,” she continues, quickly, like she expects him to interrupt her, “you should talk about it. That’s what my mom says—when you aren’t okay, you should talk to people. And since your brother and Ryou went away and you’re all alone, you can talk to me, okay? I’m a good listener. My friend Hana says so too, even though sometimes I talk a lot—” The girl sucks in air, out of breath. “Hello? Are you still there?”  
  
Marik stands slowly, unsure and not exactly equipped to handle these kinds of situations. He cracks the door open and she jumps to her feet, the knees of her tights dirty. Marik should sweep the porch. “What’s your name?”  
  
“Chiyo.” She tucks her chin to her chest and won’t meet his gaze, embarrassed. “Satoru—this stupid boy at school—says it’s an ugly name but he’s a moron so I don’t listen to him.”  
  
“My name is Marik.”  
  
Chiyo bows, very formal, and then waltzes past him into the house, dropping her backpack at the door and taking off her shoes like ‘stranger danger’ means nothing to her. “Nice to meet you!” Padding into the kitchen, she peers up at the cabinets. “My mom says tea always helps, too. Do you have tea?”  
  
As Marik moves to make tea, boiling the water and setting out two cups, she wanders around. “This is a big house. Do you live here alone? My big sister lives in a big house like this, but she’s at university and she has a bunch of roommates.”  
  
“This is Ryou’s house.” Why is he telling her this? “Ryou and his brother lived here, and so did my brother and I. But they’re gone.” The kettle whistles and he picks it up with his bare hands, pours two cups of tea.  
  
“Are you going to stay in this big house all by yourself?” Chiyo sits down across from him at the table, her little legs dangling above the ground.  
  
After they’d identified the bodies two weeks ago, Ryou’s father had pressed the house keys into Marik’s hand and mumbled something about an apartment downtown that’s closer to the museum. Dead daughter, dead wife, dead son—Marik understands why he won’t go back to a house full of ghosts. “I was a tomb-keeper, long ago. Now this is a tomb. It’s what I do.”  
  
“But won’t you be lonely?”  
  
He shrugs. “I suppose I will.”  
  
Chiyo stares furiously at her tea for a couple of minutes and Marik looks at her, wondering how he gets himself into these situations. Her head snaps back up and she reaches across the table to grab his hand with little fingers. “I’ll come back, okay? So you don’t have to be lonely.”  
  
Marik stares at her and realizes who she reminds him of and gods, it hurts. “Okay.”  
  
-  
  
A month later, he runs into Atem at the market and calmly buries a switchblade in his gut. He’s still picking a stubborn speck of blood out from under his fingernail when he rounds the corner back to the house, and someone calls his name. Chiyo is sitting on the steps, as usual, backpack hugged to her chest. She rockets to her feet as he gets closer, all coltish, gangly limbs and messy hair. “I brought you cookies!” she blurts, cheeks red. “It was Satoru’s birthday.”  
  
Marik leans down low enough for her to sling her skinny arms around his neck in a hug, and pulls the keys from his pocket. “I thought you didn’t like Satoru.”  
  
Chiyo looks at him like he’s dim. “I don’t like him, but I’ll still take his cookies.” She shucks off her shoes as Marik chuckles, and slips on socked feet to the kitchen table, pulling Tupperware containers out of her backpack. By the time Marik walks over, Chiyo has a cookie waiting for him, but the Egyptian picks up another container and rattles it. “Are these bones?”  
  
“Chicken bones.” The set of her face is stubborn, like she’s daring him to make fun of her. “My dad buries them in the backyard for me to find. I want to be an archaeologist when I grow up.”  
  
Marik arches an eyebrow and takes a bite of his cookie. “Who do you want to dig up?” he asks around a mouthful of chocolate chips.  
  
The frown eases from her face slowly. “I like Egypt. My aunt went once and brought me back photos of the pyramids.” The more she talks, the more excited she becomes. “And she brought me a big book of stories, too—about the gods and stuff, but I think they’re called myths, actually—and I really like all of them!”  
  
It’s suddenly a gargantuan effort to swallow. “Even the sad ones?”  
  
Chiyo nods and pulls a notebook from her bag. “Even the sad ones. I started to learn hieroglyphics so I can read them all by myself.” Flipping her notebook over to him, she circles the doodles in the corners of her notes.  
  
Marik takes a pencil from her backpack and points to one of the glyphs. “Is this ‘house’?” He draws a vertical line under the figure. “You need to add a line underneath. But otherwise, this is good. You’re very smart, Chiyo.”  
  
“How do you know?” Chiyo wrinkles her nose and eats another cookie.  
  
“What kind of Egyptian would I be if I couldn’t read hieroglyphics?” Marik grins at her.  
  
Her little fingers grip his arm tight and she gapes at him. “Really? Can you teach me?! Please?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
When Chiyo’s father comes to pick her up—which will probably never cease being awkward—Chiyo is curled up on the couch, steadfastly translating some hieroglyphics Marik jotted down in her notebook. Her father can’t be pleased that his daughter is spending her time in some strange man’s house, but all he asks is, “What is she doing?”  
  
“Reading hieroglyphics.” Marik tosses an eraser and it bounces off Chiyo’s forehead. She looks up scowling, but smiles when she sees her dad.  
  
“Hieroglyphics?”  
  
Marik shrugs. “I made her do her math homework first, though.”  
  
Chiyo’s father appraises him for a long, long minute, and just as Marik is starting to chafe under the scrutiny, he smiles. “You’re alright. I was worried, you know, but you seem like a good kid.” He puts his hand on Marik’s shoulder and whispers conspiratorially, “Especially if you can make her do her homework!”  
  
Marik shuts the door behind them once they’re gone, and sets about washing the dishes in the sink—he’s going to have to buy some actual groceries if Chiyo keeps coming by, he can live on canned noodles, but she probably shouldn’t. He’s up to his elbows in suds when the doorbell rings.  
  
Wet fingers slipping on the knob, he pulls the door open without looking first. “Did Chiyo forget something or—oh. Ishizu.”  
  
She stands on the porch awkwardly, Rishid fidgeting behind her. “We wanted to see how you were doing.” Ishizu smiles at him, and Marik finds himself unworthy. “Can we come in?”  
  
Marik opens the door wider and waves them inside.  
  
-  
  
It was probably a bad idea to take a ten-year-old on a motorcycle, but it was her birthday so Marik made an exception. Calling Ryou’s father had been more cathartic than he would have hoped, and Marik hung up with an open invitation to the museum and a promise to keep in touch—and if the father was anything like the son, Marik knew he meant it.  
  
He parks the bike in the employee lot and helps Chiyo off, stowing her helmet in the trunk mount and only half paying attention as she scolds him for not wearing one himself. “—your dumb hair isn’t going to protect you!”  
  
Rolling his eyes, Marik leads them around to the main entrance and shows his new ID to the security guard. “Girl, are you going to keep scolding me or do you want to see your surprise?”  
  
“But you already gave me a present,” Chiyo slips one hand in his and shows him the new ankh hanging around her neck with the other as they wander through the displays. “And I’ve been to the museum before. I’ve seen the shabtis on display—”  
  
“Twenty-two times,” Marik finishes. “I know. But we’re not going to the shabti display. What I want to show you is even....” Something familiar flits past him from the corner of his eye and Marik turns, trailing off. Hoping he’s wrong.  
  
He’s not. Yugi and his friends stand in front of where the tablet was on display six months ago, staring at the leftover fixtures on the ceiling. Atem isn’t with them. Marik leads Chiyo around the edges of the room, trying to avoid being seen.  
  
“Marik?”  
  
Well, shit.  
  
He turns and watches them come closer like some sort of amorphous hivemind, eyes flitting from him to Chiyo. Marik aims for neutral. “The pharaoh isn’t with you today?”  
  
“No,” Tristan snaps. He leans down to Chiyo. “Is he supposed to be taking you somewhere?”  
  
Chiyo looks up at Marik, as if to make sure he’s really seeing this too, then back to Tristan. “No,” she drawls, and oops, she’s picking up all of his bad habits, “he’s going to gobble me up and grind my bones to make his bread. Happy?”  
  
Marik’s lips twist into a wry grin, and he decides that’s answer enough, but when he pulls away, fingers close around his arm. Joey tightens his grip and starts to reel him back in. Marik turns slowly and murmurs, low enough that the girl doesn’t hear, “Do you want me to gut you like I did your friend? I have enough blades to spare.”  
  
The hand around his bicep vanishes, and Marik leers at them before pulling Chiyo into the next room. She stares back at the Friendship Cult over her shoulder before craning her head back around. “Where are we going? This is the back of the museum. There aren’t any other exhibits back here.”  
  
They walk up to a steel door marked ‘Employees Only.’ Marik hums a reply as he pulls out his wallet. “Mmhm.”  
  
She pulls on his hand as he scans his ID on the door lock. “We can’t go in there! Marik, we’re gonna get in trouble!” The lock disengages and Marik opens the door. Chiyo gasps. “No _way._ ”  
  
Marik ushers her in and the door swings shut after them. “Way.”  
  
He leads her past storage and archives, straight back to where the Egyptian artifacts are kept. A harried-looking graduate student is leaning against one of the table, and she jerks upright when they come in. “You’re the two the curator was talking about?” Marik nods, so she continues, “Do you want me to give you guys a tour, or...?”  
  
“You look busy,” Marik replies, leading Chiyo away from the canopic jar she was peering in, “and I sort of know my way around. I think we’ll be fine.”  
  
“Hey, you knew Malik, right?”  
  
Marik jerks to a halt, and Chiyo pulls her hand from his to run up to the table and peer at its contents. “Yes. He’s my brother.” _Was._  
  
The grad student nods. “I’d thought so. He was here like six months ago, with the curator’s kid? Right before—” She stops, gauges his reaction, unsure if it’s okay for her to continue. “Anyway, he used to come by and help set up displays and do some paperwork. He once helped me haul this stupid sarcophagus into the front case and set it up—it would have taken me _hours_ by myself. I, um, I just never got a chance to thank him before the accident.” An accident? Is that what she was told? She offers him a smile. “Your brother was a good kid.”  
  
He’s saved from answering by Chiyo’s bright voice. “What are these?” Bits of papyrus litter the table, all in disarray, next to notes and printed transliterations.  
  
The grad student rubs her forehead. “These are the bane of my existence.” When Chiyo looks at her blankly, she explains, “It’s a bit of a scroll I’ve been trying to translate for two days, and it’s still not making sense. I’m missing something stupid, but I have no idea what I’m doing wrong.”  
  
Before either of them can stop her, Chiyo reaches across the table and rearranges the papyrus fragments. The grad student looks like she’s about to have a coronary, but Chiyo doesn’t bat an eye. “This is the red crown,” she explains, flipping a hieroglyphic over and slipping it in the middle. “It’s less common than the water hieroglyphic, but it was sometimes still used for the letter ‘n’.”  
  
“It’s been _upside-down_ this whole time?” The grad student’s jaw drops. “Wait. How do you know that?”  
  
Chiyo looks unbearably smug in the way only a ten-year-old can and pokes Marik in the side. “He taught me.”  
  
Marik suddenly finds himself under scrutiny. “And how does _he_ know that?”  
  
“Because he’s awesome.”  
  
Shrugging away the compliment, Marik steers Chiyo further into the back and settles into one of the rickety fold-out chairs to wait while Chiyo marvels over old tablets and rubbings from temple walls. He starts to zone out as she presses her face to the glass protecting dry old papyrus scrolls, and doesn’t notice that she’s wandering deeper and deeper into the room until he hears tarp being pulled off of something and rustling to the ground. “What’s this?”  
  
Before he even looks, Marik knows what she’s talking about. The table in the back of the room is still where he and Ryou’s father had shoved it, one of the corners scraping the paint off the wall it rubbed against. His legs are leaden as he walks over to Chiyo, who’s tentatively touching the small figurines. “This is so cool! Hey, look at this one!” She shows him an ugly figurine with misshapen purple eyes and gold scribbles. She’s bubbling with excitement because she doesn’t _know_ , and Marik just watches her. Can’t speak, can’t breathe—damnit, he thought he was tougher than this.  
  
Chiyo stops as she comes around the other side, eyes wide as she stares at a bloody handprint on the tabletop. “Is that real?”  
  
_Yes._  
  
“No.” His voice is a croak, so Marik clears his throat and tries again. “No, it’s just decorative. For show.” He sinks into the chair Ryou must have sat in, because Malik liked to stand when he dueled, and spreads his own hand over the bloody print, dwarfing it.  
  
Chiyo takes that in stride and moves on, leaning back over the display and scooping something up in her hands. Seven pieces of polymer clay, painted gold and carved with expert precision. Marik heard from Mokuba that the real ones had sunk into the sand back in Egypt. “What are these?”  
  
“You said you like all of the myths from Ancient Egypt?” Marik pulls his fingers away from the handprint. “Even the sad ones?”  
  
“Yeah! Will you tell me?”  
  
Marik nods and Chiyo settles down on the dusty floor in front of him, so he tells her a story about pharaohs with golden talismans and battles on flying ships and boys who loved their brothers so much they chased them into the afterworld. And about the boys who went after them.  
  
-  
  
Chiyo’s mascara is smudged, her eyes are red from crying, and Marik wonders where stupid sixteen-year-olds get off looking so damn young. The Book of the Dead leans against the door where he’d thrown it, sulfur smoke still rises from the black smear on the carpet. “Damnit, Chiyo! These spells aren’t a game! What the hell were you thinking?!”  
  
She hiccups and rubs her eyes with her fists, then scowls at her blackened hands. “S-Sorry. I was just,” she takes a deep breath, “I was just so _mad._ ” Smoothing her hands over dress, she still looks awed. “I didn’t think it would actually _work_ , and I was just so mad at stupid Satoru and I just—I’m sorry.”  
  
Marik makes a mental note to pay stupid Satoru a visit. “It’s fine. You’re fine. You’re okay.” He’s not sure which one of them he’s reassuring. “It’s good you don’t ever take that ankh off, or you’d be dead right now.”  
  
Chiyo nods and kicks off her heels. Marik leans against her bedroom wall and lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. Chiyo pulls her legs up onto the bed and asks, quietly. “How old are you?”  
  
Marik knows where this is going. “Not as old as you think I am.”  
  
“You said you were from Egypt, but you couldn’t pick it out on a map when you were helping me with geography in the sixth grade.” The memory makes her smile and Marik had hoped this conversation would never happen. “You speak Middle Egyptian but you don’t know any Arabic.” She points to the photos lining her dresser. “You don’t age.”  
  
“Chiyo,” he slides down the wall and rests his elbows on his knees, “it’s a lot more complicated than you think.”  
  
Shaking her head, she laughs under her breath. “The first time I met you, you picked up a hot tea kettle with your bare hands!” She looks up at him. “You told me once that you used to be a tomb keeper. Are you a shabti or something?”  
  
It’s a decent theory, but Marik throws his head back and laughs. He only knows one pharaoh and the idea of serving him makes him want to vomit. Chiyo’s expression is stubborn, and she scowls at him until he stops. “Apologies.” Marik cranes his head up at the ceiling and asks, quietly, “Do you remember that story I told you, on your tenth birthday?”  
  
"Yeah." It takes her a moment. “It wasn’t just a story?”  
  
“No. No, it wasn’t.”  
  
Marik isn’t entirely sure how much time passes until Chiyo speaks again, and it isn’t what he expects. “Okay. Okay.” She wrings her hands together. “That makes sense. I mean, when you got to the part about the flying battleship, I had kind of figured you were talking about the first Battle City tournament that Seto Kaiba had set up, so I thought you were just making the story up.” Getting up, she steps into her closet and starts to change out of her dress. As she throws her ruined, sulfur-smudged dress in a heap by her bed, her voice trails into the main room, quiet and hesitant. “So, the guy that saved my life when I was little—Bakura? He was really going to kill a pharaoh? With that table in the museum? And Duel Monsters cards?”  
  
The Egyptian had wondered if it would hurt to talk about it, seven years later. “Yes.”  
  
“But he saved me instead?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Shuffling out of her closet in fluffy pajamas with Dark Magicians patterned all over them, Chiyo sits down on the floor next to him and rests her head on his shoulder. “Why?”  
  
His chest aches. “I don’t know.”  
  
“I don’t even remember why I was in the road that day,” she whispers, and it feels like a confession but Marik’s not a god. “And sometimes I wonder if Bakura even meant to save me.”  
  
Part of Marik doesn’t want to know this, wants to pretend that Ryou didn’t throw his life—and Malik’s—away for someone who threw away theirs.  
  
“But he did,” Chiyo adds, to Marik’s surprise. “He was still standing on the sidewalk when he saw me, and he paused, like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to risk it.” Voice watery, she laughs. “I guess he thought he could make it? ‘Save the girl, go home and take a nap before annihilating the arch-nemesis, all in a day’s work’ sort of thing?”  
  
Marik exhales hard enough to feel his muscles contract. He wants to laugh again, but it feels too hard. “Probably. He was sort of an idiot.” Once the words start, they don’t stop. “And an asshole, too, honestly. Ryou was the nice one, and the smart one, which is probably why Malik followed him around like a lovesick puppy. It was almost as funny as it was pathetic, sometimes. And Bakura smoked. Gods, he smoked a lot. He was a fucking ashtray, it was disgusting.”  
  
“Way to ruin my superhero fantasy, Marik.” She pokes him in the side. He pokes her back. “Can you tell me about them?”  
  
Can he? “What do you want to know?”  
  
-  
  
He gets texts from her while she’s away at university—on full scholarship, bolstered by an “uncanny” understanding of Middle Egyptian and letters of recommendation from the curator of the Domino Museum and Ishizu Ishtar. Between Skype calls and visits over her breaks, Chiyo sends him messages almost every day.  
  
_German sucks.  
  
My roommate has a motorcycle, but yours is so much cooler. I wish you could fly it out with you somehow when you come to visit.  
  
You scared the boy down the hall, and I’d almost gotten him to grow a pair and ask me out after a year and a half. No more visits for you._ Two minutes later, Marik’s phone buzzes again. _No, never mind. You can still visit. Maybe. Just stop scaring boys._  
  
Junior year, Chiyo sends him a photo with the caption, _Check out the grad student TAs in my class._ It’s Yugi and the pharaoh, halfway through writing something up on the whiteboard.  
  
Marik smirks. _Ask him if he’s seen my switchblade.  
  
Why? Where was it last?  
  
His spleen, I think.  
  
EWWWWWWWWWW!!!!! Really?_  
  
He’s just walking out of the museum after a consult with Ryou’s father, and his phone chirps, “You have one new message!”  
  
It’s Chiyo, obviously—Ryou’s father calls and his siblings swing by the house when they want to find him. _Hey, my graduation is in two weeks. You’re coming, right?  
  
Of course.  
  
Awesome! You and Ishizu and Rishid and Mr. Bakura are sitting with my family, you know._  
  
Marik swipes his card and gets onto the subway train, leaning against the railing. Someone punches him in the shoulder and when he turns, it’s Mokuba, who grew up as tall and weedy as his older brother and still drags him out for lunch and video games twice a month. Marik smirks and yanks Mokuba’s tie in retaliation, and fires back at Chiyo, _You’re not serious. It’ll be awkward. Your sister flirts with me._  
  
_Oh, please. My sister’s got a girlfriend, and she only flirts with you to watch you squirm because you have absolutely no social skills. (Your siblings and Mr. Bakura and Mokuba don’t count!)_ Marik is about to formulate a scathing reply about how he gets coffee with the grad students at the museum, thank you very much, when Chiyo sends another message. _By the way, my professor wants to take me to the Valley of the Kings for an internship after graduation, and it’ll probably work out to a job. Here, let me call you—I’m so excited!_  
  
Chiyo does make him sit with her family, and it is awkward, and Marik has a blast.  
  
-  
  
Marik gets a package in the mail and knows immediately who it’s from. The brown wrapping paper smells like dry heat and sand trickles from the folds. The first layer peels away to reveal an envelope, tucked in with a small box. Inside is a ticket to Cairo and a scribbled letter on a torn-out notebook page. ‘Remember when you said the Millennium Items were just a myth?’  
  
He tears the box apart, wood giving under his grasp, and wrapped in burlap lies the Millennium Ring. Marik’s legs give and he sinks to the floor, taking the Ring out of the box and rubbing his thumb over the subtle welds in the frame that he put there, fifteen years ago. His cell phone rings and he fishes it out of his pocket.  
  
The connection is shit and wind howls through the line, but Chiyo sounds exhilarated. “Did you get my package?”  
  
Marik smiles. “Yes, I did. Thank you.”  
  
“Are you coming? You better come—I’m pretty sure sending you that is illegal, so now you have to bring it back.” She huffs into the phone, out of breath. “I have so many things I want to show you!”  
  
Marik remembers an old labyrinth of crypts, Malik’s home, and wonders if sand has buried the back exit too deep to be uncovered. He wonders if Shadi has emptied it of all its treasures. “I have some things to show you, too.”


End file.
